The Serious Business of Clowning: Tom Dougherty
by Jeffrey Stanley
“One of these days I’m going to run away and join a town,” said Tom Dougherty reciting an old one-liner among circus folk. Tom, the itinerant star clown in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus’ newest show, Over the Top, touring nationwide, spoke last week to 9th and 10th graders in Jeremy Richards’ drama class on the stage of the Pearl Street Meeting House. “I’m not that comfortable saying it but I am the star clown. I am a character that they build a story around. It’s told through me and the ringmaster,” he said.
His excitement at returning to his alma mater as a guest speaker was palpable. “I came here voluntarily because I love this school, I love this place, I love what it did for me. Someone from this very school, who graduated on this very stage, went on to a successful career in the performing arts,” he told the class. He explained his personal approach to clowning, talked about its history as a legitimate form of theatre dating back thousands of years, and worked to dispel some common assumptions about clowning, stressing that he doesn’t do birthday parties and he doesn’t make balloon animals. “Audiences have an expectation that you have to meet halfway,” he said, “but I don’t wear colored wigs. I don’t go out and do Bozo, it’s just not who I am. I don’t want a costume that creates a barrier between me and the audience.” Instead he wears coat and tails which he explained was a nod to silent screen comic legend Buster Keaton. “But I do,” he confided, “wear slap shoes. But not too big.”
Tom entered BFS as a sophomore, a few years before the school had moved into the Pearl Street building. He had earlier attended a boarding school in Delaware. “It was cool but I missed all of my friends in Brooklyn. And they were all going to Friends. It was the 70’s, a rebellious time shall we say, this was a progressive school so I begged my parents to let me go here.”
While here he was drawn to art classes and in particular to drawing comics. His grandfather had taught him oil painting from an early age so his talent came naturally. “After I graduated I went to Pratt Institute to study animation but I wasn’t that enamored with college. I went to another school and tried political science.” That also fell by the wayside, he said. One summer a friend asked him to help paint a set for a theatrical production in Brooklyn. “Then an actor got sick so they asked me to stand in for him. We had a rehearsal and they offered me a contract at the end of the day.”
Tom felt he had found his niche and began pursuing acting in earnest. A year later he was taking acting and dance classes at the esteemed Neighborhood Playhouse School for Theatre run by famed acting coach Sanford Meisner. “I was naturally animated, had studied animation, and wanted to bring that to life.” He had begun developing an idea to do a one-man show on Shakespeare’s clowns when lightning struck. Or was it a joy buzzer? “I saw in the paper that Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey were holding auditions for a clown college. I thought, clown college? What’s that?”
Around the same time he had injured his knee sledding in Brooklyn which had required medical treatment. He really wanted to try out for clown college but it conflicted with his Meisner classes. “They were very strict there. You miss one class, you’re out of the program.” Tom, in true form as a relentless protagonist and impassioned actor, recounted that he went to a supermarket, bought some red food coloring and Karo syrup and made fake blood which he smeared across his recent (and nicely healing) knee injury. “I went in and showed them. I told them I’d fallen on the way to class and had reopened my wound, but I had to come to class or I’d get kicked out! They said, Oh no, you can’t take class like that, don’t worry about it. And I said, but no, I must! And they said, Don’t be silly, you go home. So I left, wiped off the fake blood, and went to audition for clown college.” The rest, as they say, is history.
In addition to performing Tom has taught clowning and movement theatre for 25 years. He spoke to the students not just about circus life but about the possibilities for a successful career in the performing arts. “Clowning has a very rich and ancient history but it’s also a job. I get to go out in front of 6000 people to make them laugh. I see it as living poetry.” In addition to his current gig, Tom has performed with Cirque du Soleil, has been hired to use clowning for diversity training workshops in white collar corporations, was the first American actor to perform in Vietnam, and was part of the Big Apple Circus’s Clown Care Unit bringing cheer to young cancer patients in a Washington, DC hospital. “The research has confirmed it,” he said. “Among clowned and unclowned populations the clowned recovery rate is higher.”
He concluded by extolling the virtues of acting to these young drama students. “Theatre training gives you trust in yourself, a confidence for many careers. Let it bring you out so there’s nothing holding you back.”